An Anxious Night in Karachi

The city of Karachi was in lockdown last night. At 10 P.M., the shops were shuttered and closed, the streets deserted. “Usually you can get a kebab or a beer here until 2:30 A.M.,” H. M. Naqvi, a thirty-six-year-old Pakistani novelist, said as he drove through the emptied streets in an ancient, borrowed Mercedes.

Naqvi is the author of “Homeboy,” a post-9/11 novel that follows three high-living Pakistanis in New York City who end up, mistakenly, in F.B.I. detention. Naqvi’s head is shaved, and he wore a tank top, olive linen pants, and cowboy boots. He was uncharacteristically anxious, as were many in the city, though not because of the killing of Osama bin Laden. Earlier the same day, in Karachi, a local political heavyweight had been assassinated. (Naqvi called the coincidence “serendipity.”) No one knew if his men would take to the streets and burn cars or wreak any other havoc.

He turned off the main road and into the sandy, stinking parking lot of a roadside café. He comes here every day to write for two hours. This place, too, was uninhabited; the proprietor, an architect, had sent his patrons home. Naqvi settled in anyway at his usual table, above which hangs a poster of his novel. (He is currently at work on his second.) To ward off the mosquitoes, he lit a Davidoff and ordered a coffee. On the wall, a Palestinian flag read “I ♥ Gaza.”

“Bin Laden is a horrible character. Yet his death doesn’t mean as much here to the south in Karachi as it does in the north, which borders Afghanistan,” Naqvi said. “Most of the year, the exogenous shock of the Afghan War doesn’t touch our lives.” The farmers who live an hour outside of Karachi are more concerned with the price of wheat than with the death of bin Laden, he said. On the front of this murky war, the country’s internal divisions are as varied as the weather. Karachi, a city of as many as eighteen million people—Hindus, Christians, Zoroastrians (called Parsis), and Muslims (Shia, Sunnis, Ismaelis, and various Sufi-inspired sects to name a few)—patronizes a saint, Abdullah Shah Ghazi, to keep them safe from the sea; rock bands play, and there is a centuries-old tradition of poetry slams, called Mushairas. Yet among those who have also called the city home are high-ranking members of Al Qaeda. After the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, hundreds of foreign fighters fled through Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas and continued onward via Karachi. Khalid Sheikh Mohamed led a 9/11 cell from Karachi.

“To say, ‘Pakistan is…’ is a fraught construction,” Naqvi said. As for the events of this week, “what this will do is unsettle Pakistan,” Naqvi said. “We will have to pick up the pieces like we always do.” That might be unfair, but it was, in part, a function of Karachi simply being where it is on the world map. “It would be nice if we were located next to Canada, but this is a tough neighborhood.”